My Business Is Dying

> Last time I worked at a company was November 2020. I love programming, but I really do not enjoy programming at a company. Things were bad in 2020, but I feel like they’re worse now. They're much worse now, but that also creates more opportunity than ever before. Chaos truly can be a ladder if you take advantage of it and endure the unhappy parts. Having a bit of savings to work with can make all the difference. You can focus on emerging opportunities without melting down over your next paycheck. The concept of W-2 employment is completely dead to me now. Especially for this kind of technology work. I charge per outcome now (1099). I am no longer interested in being provided what amounts to hazard pay for the job of interacting with an adult day care center every day. Walking in as a hired gun with no political agenda and a clear mission feels great compared to where I was before. When I do participate in the clients' meetings, I generally get away with murder because I am laser focused on the outcome itself (my compensation) rather than belaboring whatever technical details behind it. If I'm on a call these days, there's an explicit reason for it. The business can sense that I am aligned with their goals, so the proverbial seas tend to be parted whenever I unmute my microphone. The clients' salaried developers loathe me to the extent that it's creating even more opportunities. The amount of unqualified ego tripping in tech has become astounding and can serve as a powerful ally for humble wizards.

There is something I'd call Subscription Fatigue. People and businesses are asked to pay subscription fees left and right. If I convert my bank statements only each quarter in a spike or once or twice a year, why should I pay for each month or the entire year? Of course I don't know the real usage patterns of this application, but that's one scenario I'd think of.

> My friends tell me the job is basically managing AI agents and reading Pull Requests. That sounds like hell, and I’ll try to avoid it for as long as possible. It really is not that bad when you are in a company with a good culture. Leadership is gonna be AI piled everywhere, but imho that's how you learn where to use (and not to use) the technology.

The author’s product extracts data from bank statement PDFs and puts it in XLSX format. Both of the banks I use provide CSV data export from their apps. I’m not surprised the business is struggling - the author hasn’t found a deep enough problem to solve.

> People are using AI to convert their bank statements. This works pretty well if you only have a few pages of bank statements to convert. If you have hundreds of pages, then you’ll need to pay for AI to do the conversion. Or you could have AI write a script to handle the conversion for your specific bank. It'll be faster than any service and free forever.